Very good work. Question - Where do you see feed additives in poultry in Europe in the 5 years?
Thank you Theunis... I think the breeding companies will target higher performance in the future to cope with the increasing demand for high quality animal products. In my opinion, the problem will be that nutrition is not able to keep pace with the development. We see this today already as the biological or genetic potential of the animal is hardly reached under normal farming conditions. The increased performance can only be achieved if nutrition is adapted accordingly. It is quite difficult to predict the future development of the industry. But in my opinion, nutrition is the only possibility to trigger high performance. And feed additives for sure will become more and more important to ensure the demand of consumers for high quality, safe and clean products.
Interesting article about The Use of Nucleotides in Animal Feed and feed additives. Are you using nucleotides in pet food? what are the ingredients containing nucleotides? Is egg powder considered as one of this?
Yes, there are numerous trial experiments available from fish and shrimp demonstrating the benefits of nucleotide supplemention of feed additives in aquaculture. According to our experience nucleotide products must be added to the feed. The usage of nucleotide products as "top-dressing" is not recommended due to the solubility of nucleotides in water. If the products are mixed into the feed the loss of nucleotides is neglectable.
Our products are successfully used in Parent and Grandparent stocks. Unfortunately we did never check for the effects of nucleotides on transferring humoral antibodies there. This is an interesting topic we should consider in a trial in the future. In broilers we have done several trials focusing on the time to develop intestinal structures and imune response in chicks. It turned out that nucleotides, when correctly dosed and well balanced for the needs of the chicks, improve the development and gain time in the development. For instance the development of intestinal villi structure usually takes two weeks before completed. The addition of nucleotides reduces this time for proper development of intestinal structures to ten days. This advantage in the development of tissues and regulatory systems of chicks is retained until culling even if the nucleotides are not continously added to the feed. We actually recommend to use the nucleotides for the first ten days only. The benefits of feeding nucleotides from day-old until day ten of broilers is retained until culling resulting in reduced mortalities and improved weight gain as well as increased final weight of the birds. Nucleotides are not protein structures that can be denatured. Nucleotides are biological active molecules that are quite stabel even during pellatization or extrusion of feed. Nucleotides endure temperatures of up to 140 - 160 degrees for a short period of time (5 minutes or so). We have tried to sterilize solutions containing nucleotides at 120 degrees for more than 20 minutes at elevated pressure (autoclaving) and did not find any reduction in the nucleotide content or composition.
Hi Dr. Klaus, I would like to understand how the nucleotides used for feed, food and pharmaceutical usage are different and the different quality certification required in each of the end use industry. From my research I have observed that the use of nucelotides in pharma industry is limited to grams or to kilograms scale. Could you kindly help me understand if it is a possible scenario that there are manufacturers for pharmaceutical grade nucleotides, with metric ton scale production capabilities. Any inputs from your side will help me a great deal. Regards, Utkarsh Jhanwar
Dear Dr. Hoffmann I would like to inform you that we have the biggest poultry industry in our region ( Middle East) . Use of hormones and antibodies in feed has been stop and forbidden since about 5 years or longer. I am interest to replace the hormones or antibodies by nucleotides products, but first we need the searching, and test and check in farms for determine of efficacy and quality of this product to academic, clinical doctors and producers in my country, Iran ( for suggest that they can use this in this industry). I need your help, how can you help me to do? Best Hamid
Dear Dr. Naghash, please contact me to discuss this in detail. Thank you